Judging from the film, director Aneta Lesnikovska, a Macedonian resident in the Netherlands, is someone with a bad toothache but no other human qualities such as a conscience or a minimal respect for her friends. She has no qualms about lying to them, telling them that she is working on the first Balkan dogma film and that Danish producers will be coming in several weeks. Before even an idea of the story for the film has been proposed, she starts to recruit the much-needed “stars” from among her friends, who all immediately line up for such a perfect opportunity. Leslikovska shows them von Trier’s The Idiots as an example of a dogme film and they unanimously hate it, yet they still want to be a part of her project. Some are willing to have sex on screen if that is what it takes, and others may have had sex offscreen to secure their parts.

In the press notes, the film cheekily presents itself as “reality based on fiction”, leaving it up to the viewer to decide whether the material presented is actual documentary footage or showcases unknown actors pretending to be real people who are asked to be part of a non-existent feature project. Seen how conveniently everything that is important for its non-story was caught on tape and especially the increasingly improbable dealings involving a local politician, the latter seems more likely.

Ultimately, however, this does not change anything about the quality or the mechanisms of the film, which either portrays actors trying to become famous by playing in a faux-documentary or real people trying to do the same by hoping they might play in a film. If the film is real, Lesnikovska is a monster that ruthlessly exploits and manipulates her not-so-bright friends (who should stay away from her in the future), and if the film is not, Leslikovska and her actors might have at least tried to make an engaging and intelligent yarn about how people get blinded by an offer to possibly become famous.

The story as it stands is weak, overly simple and high on the emotional blackmail so typical of reality TV, but since it has become so ubiquitous instead of shocking it is just fastidious. The film also contains long and meandering scenes that serve as little else than filler, including footage of the director’s mother and grandmother, scenes set in a church and at a rustic party.

Watching Boli li? Prvata balkanska dogma would turn the film into a self-fulfilling prophecy, giving the makers exactly the fame they crave, even if it is only for the film’s drawn-out 90 minutes. Do you want to play that game?

For the record: the first dogma film from the Balkans breaks more than one of the rules of the dogme manifesto.

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